


cacoethes

by pyknicGinger



Series: addiction is a hell, especially when you don't even know what you're addicted to [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Post-Sburb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 09:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6417898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyknicGinger/pseuds/pyknicGinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he's been gone for a week, and there's no comfort in slowly dying for a reason you don't understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cacoethes

**Author's Note:**

> more imagery practice

The shakes come in the shower, the first time you've tried to get yourself clean in too long (far too long). They wash over you without warning, not quiet or slow or easy but startlingly abrupt—sharp and pronounced, painful. It's not a kind of physical hurt, though, it's a mental one. All at once, in a single instant, you're helpless, completely helpless. Your body won't listen to you, your hands can't grip anything and your legs are weak and you end up leaning against the tile, putting all of your weight on your right hip (your bony right hip and that _does_ hurt) as long as you can, just standing there, waiting, hoping you don't fall.

You do, though. It's inevitable.

You always fall.

Half of the soap (the shampoo, the body wash, the toothpaste) on the ledge goes with you when you hit the bottom of the tub, and it takes everything in your whole being not to hit your head. You've done that before—cracked your skull on the side of it—and that fucking _sucks_. Not because of the pain, really, or the ringing in your brain or the black spots in your vision or the crippling dizziness or the numbness that comes after. It sucks because you _can't do a goddamn thing about it_ , so you just have to sit there until the hot water runs out or longer, until you can force your limbs up enough to roll onto the bathroom floor, where you'll lay cold and shaking and empty (so _fucking_ empty), wanting to cry and cry and cry and _cry_ but completely incapable of doing so.

And when you finally get your balance enough to sit, and then maybe stand, and then maybe walk, you have to find a towel, and it could be ten minutes after it all starts or it could be thirty. This time it's somewhere in between, near twenty, but nothing feels particularly real and all of your focus is on not throwing up (just breathe just breathe just breathe) so you can't really be sure. It's a hell. It's _always_ a hell.

Once you have the towel in your hand, you stand there in front of the rack, gripping the fabric white-knuckled against the wall for balance (you can't put it around you yet, you're still standing naked and dripping in the cold bathroom on the cold tile, because if you take your weight off the wall you'll fall again) and willing your arm to move and your knees to stay locked, because you have to turn the shower off, you have to, it's still running—just do it just fucking _do it god damn it move move move_ —but when you finally get your other hand on the faucet you can't get your fingers to bend all the way. All of your focus, all of your power is on the towel and on not buckling and the handle is still slick and—

—and you're down again, fuck, you're down again, but you don't hit your head so you're fine, really, you're fine.

Now that you're on the floor a second time you kind of drape the towel over you and sit there. You don't have to concentrate on staying upright so you can actually reach over to turn off the water this time, and that's progress. That's good progress. Only  six and a half minutes later (a new record, you think, thank fuck) you're on your feet again, and with one hand bracing yourself against the wall you make some small attempt at drying yourself off (you fail miserably), and then you slowly (slowly slowly _slowly_ ) grab the grimy sweatpants on the bathroom floor, the same ones you've been wearing for three days, maybe four days, you can't remember (it's been so long since He left that you've lost track of time) and you put them on with a kind of prayer that takes up all of your whole being, because balancing on one leg is the biggest challenge yet.

For once, you succeed.

It's incredible, and you think maybe you should feel more victory than you do, but you still don't feel _anything_ , and you hands still aren't really listening to you so you forgo even trying to put on a shirt. The cotton sticks to your legs and your balls where your skin is still sort of wet, and it's an uncomfortable, chafing mess, but you ignore it just like you do everything else and try to walk more than three steps. The walls in your disgusting den become your new best friends, holding you up, bearing the weight of everything you are as it crumbles around you—as _you_ crumble around you—as your joints creak and ache and your bones break and your head spins and—

—and there's your chair, your greasy throne, surrounded by the carnage of your fucked up life. Plastic cups and chipped mugs and half-empty liquor bottles, week-old congealed coffee, water and sickeningly sweet fruit punch from the corner store. The crusty red-stained plate leftover from partially-eaten microwave nachos that aren't really nachos, just a lie you tell yourself to keep sane, because tossing corn chips on ceramic and dumping room-temperature-you'll-probably-get-sick-from-this cheese and expired off-brand salsa over the whole thing and putting it in a hellish technological mess with only four working buttons doesn't _count_ , not really, but it's enough. The plastic takeout lid that's been your ashtray for too long, grimy soot swirled with soured sesame sauce, is there too, on the floor by four empty Marlboro packs and two dead lighters.

 You claw your way over to it, to your sanctuary, and then sort of drop yourself in the middle of the war. And you sit. And you shake. And you shake and you shake and you shake. And you tear at your hair (or you would, you think, if you could actually get your fingers to hold onto a single strand) and you scrape your too-long-when-was-the-last-time-you-clipped-them nails down your neck and you dig your arms into your sides, curling in on yourself, shaking, shaking, shaking.

You feel nauseous, and you can't remember the last time you ate something that couldn't possibly kill you. But food doesn't seem like a good idea right now—in fact, it seems like a _terrible_ idea—so you do the only thing you can to eat without eating and you dig your way through the crack between the  cushion of your chair and its arm as soon as you're physically able to, looking for the crushed box of smokes you know is there, and the lighter that—if left alone—could probably set the whole thing on fire and burn you alive. It takes too long to get one lit and the moment you do you start coughing, choking, because you can't get a steady breath, but the fact that you can flick the starter it at all means you're doing okay.

(You're not, though. You're not okay at all.)

So you sit and you shake and you smoke, relishing in the imaginary nicotine high that you can't even really feel any more because you do it so much, you're out of your head enough already, all you feel is withdrawal these days. Withdrawal from all the things you use to slowly kill yourself, and withdrawal from things you didn't know you needed (but now you do, oh God, _now you do and He's not here where did He go, where did He go, where did He go_ ). You stay like that, empty and broken inside and out, for so long you lose track of time. Not that you'd been keeping time in the first place, really. But you smoke and you smoke and you smoke, and you drink and you drink and you drink, and you wait and you wait and you wait, and eventually the tremors start to subside.

You don't know what causes them. You haven't been able to figure it out, not in all the weeks and months and years they've been happening. Some days you're good—you take care of yourself, you live a semi-normal life for twenty-four, forty-eight, seventy-two hours and they still come—and some days you're _not_ and they rip  you apart anyway.

Sisyphus is yelling at something, screaming, and that's what finally gets you moving again. You'd forgotten he was here (had he been here the whole time or did he come in through the window while you were dying?) and when you haul yourself up, holding on to the arm of your chair like some kind of anchor to reality, the cigarette between your teeth smoldering smoke up into your eyes and blinding you for a moment with the burn, he's on your bed, clawing at your pillow.

And he's not alone.

 


End file.
